Hands-On Windows 208 transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:00]:
Coming up next on Hands on Windows, we're going to take another look at PowerToys. There are new toys or utilities and lots of new features. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT. Hello everybody, and welcome back to Hands on Windows. I'm Paul Theriault, and this week I'm taking another look at PowerToys. I feel like we Probably do this about every 6 months, which makes sense. You know, PowerToys comes up again and again because A, it's incredible.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:35]:
It's an awesome set of utilities every Windows user should have installed on their computer. And B, it just keeps getting better. They're adding new utilities all the time and they're adding new capabilities to existing tools. So, you know, we've seen that happen. I mean, just in the probably 5 or 6 months since the last episode we discussed this. Um, we've already seen this again, so, uh, I won't go through the full list of all the utilities. I won't also go through the full list of the ones that I use, but the ones I use the most are 3. Um, Find My Mouse, and you can see the mouse cursor here.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:08]:
If I hit the Control key twice in a row, it's comically large on this display. I don't know why it looks like that. Um, it doesn't look like that on other displays, the other displays here. I think it's just because I have all these different screens, but usually a little smaller, but Helps you find the mouse cursor, which sounds like a silly problem, but it's it's a problem I have all the time. So if you're on the screen, you're like, where's the mouse cursor? Stupid game I play all the time. Control control find it really quick. Love it. The other one is one of the other ones is keyboard manager.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:38]:
This is how I get rid of the copilot key. So on a typical keyboard, depending on what you're looking at, like the laptop I'm using here, typically the left arrow key is to the right of that copilot key. And so what I do is configure the copilot key to act. as left arrow. So if I'm kind of fumble fingering and typing, and I don't mean to hit Copilot, I certainly don't mean to launch Copilot, it will just do a left arrow. So if I bring up something like Notepad here, and I just, you know, space, space, space. So normally, if I hit the Copilot key, which I'll do in one moment, Copilot will come up, right? But if I hit it on this computer, you can see it's the cursor's moving left because I've assigned it to be like the left arrow key. I love that.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:18]:
I love not having to worry about Copilot key. It's dumb that we can't turn it off, although that's coming, by the way, but someday. The other one, which can't really show you is called Light Switch. And so Light Switch is a feature that should just be built into Windows. So during the day or on whatever schedule you prefer, you can have everything be light mode. As, uh, dusk comes and the sun sets, uh, or whatever schedule you prefer, you can switch into dark mode. You know, your phone does this, the Mac does this, other platforms do it. Windows does not.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:45]:
But with this, uh, PowerToy, you can get that done. All right. So those are the ones I absolutely use all the time. I mean, there are other ones, but Those are some of the, uh, the just the ones I use the most by far. Um, now I want to look at some of the things that have changed since the last time we talked about this. Actually a lot of stuff, so we can't get to all of it. But if you go down to the system tray here, you will have this icon here, which is PowerToys. So you right-click, um, settings, and this brings up the what I think of as the kind of primary user interface for this thing, right? So over here on the right, you can see all the tools with toggles.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:24]:
And so you can see the ones that are on are the ones I have left enabled or have enabled if they were not enabled. And then you can go through, uh, this thing on the left as well. If you want to go into any of these and learn more about that tool, configure it, whatever it might be, um, you just click on it, um, directly, right? So kind of a simple interface. The thing that has changed here is in the general page, um, there is now this update channel option, right? And so what you can do is switch between the stable version, which is the one I'm using, the normal version, and the insider version. These are nightly builds. You'll get the latest features more quickly. Um, I really like PowerToys. I did use this for a little while.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:08]:
It's a little annoying. I, you know, when PowerToys has to be updated, you get a pop-up dialog, you click it, yes, and UAC, and it, you know, it just takes a little while. Um, every night to me is a little bit much, but. If you're heavily invested in this thing or using a bunch of these tools and you really want that, you can turn that on right from there. Okay. So I mentioned, uh, uh, Find My Mouse, right? Which is the Control Control, right? The ludicrous circle here. Um, but there's another related mouse, um, uh, utility in here called Mouse Highlighter. This has been here for a while.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:42]:
Um, you can see what the, um, Uh, keyboard shortcut. So you activate it Windows key plus Alt plus U. When you do it, what it does is it makes the mouse have kind of a little— you can kind of see it. So this is like if you're capturing the screen for some reason, maybe you're giving a presentation, you want them to be able to, uh, you know, highlight— you want to be able to highlight the mouse and see it like a little more easily, you can turn it on. So I believe this is on. How do I find out? So Windows key plus Alt plus U. And now I'm trying to see if I can make it do something. Maybe it's just done.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:19]:
Uh, you boop. All right. All right. So, oh, I'm in the wrong one. That's why I'm the wrong utility. I'm sorry. That's fine. My mouse on the wrong one.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:28]:
Uh, Windows key Shift plus H. That, that explains it. All right. So this gives you a little highlight, right? So Windows key plus Shift and H, um, will give you a ripple effect. This one's already on, right? And if, when I click, oh, I turned it off. Let me try it again. There you go. Now that was super subtle, unlike that giant thing that we got from Find My Mouse.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:47]:
Um, so Ripple is new. So the way this worked before was Spotlight was the highlight, uh, was the default, I believe. Circle Highlight, one of the two looks just like that, uh, effect we just saw, but you can actually configure this thing, right? So you can change the size of it. Um, I'll just like double the size. You can change the intensity of it. You can change the duration, which I'm not going to screw around with. Um, and you can change the colors, right? And so. You can see how that changes things.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:13]:
So you're giving a presentation, perhaps, like I said, or recording the screen for some reason. You want to be sure that whoever's watching it knows exactly where you're clicking, right? This is kind of a neat way to do that. So, um, this is not one that I use a lot. If I were doing some kind of a screen capture where that was important, um, I could see using it, but, um, that's just a, it's a small update, but it's kind of a neat thing. So I'll turn that off because I'll be clicking around a lot, but, um, kind of a useful thing. So we talk about, um, Command Palette a lot. Command Palette in many ways is a replacement for the Start menu, right? It's a more minimalist interface. It lets you launch things.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:50]:
Those could be apps, they could be settings, uh, they could, you know, find documents. It's kind of a nice way to search as well. Um, typically you do it with a keyboard shortcut, right? So by default it's Windows key plus Space, and this is what that interface looks like by default. And you just can type here. So I'm going to say like I want to run Notion or whatever. Um, you can see that it's the top result. You hit enter, the app runs, et cetera. So pretty straightforward.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:12]:
Um, and I closed, uh, closed PowerToys settings. So let me go back to this and I will find that thing, which is actually at the top. Sorry. Um, and to go into settings. Okay. So what they've added in a recent update is the ability to have a Um, uh, like a compact view that's more, I would say it's more similar to the macOS analog to this, which is the Spotlight search feature, right? So on the Mac, I think it's Command plus Space, you know, it brings up what looks like a search box in the middle of the screen, right? And so if you turn that on here, so compact search box, um, and then actually, and expand this because there's another thing you could do here. Um, I'm going to just hide everything real quick. I'm going to do that same keyboard shortcut.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:07]:
So you see more, more minimalist interface. Now, as you type, you're going to get that dropdown before it. So it's, it's kind of a small thing, but, um, kind of a nice graphical update. But the other bit to that is in here where you can actually position this thing on screen vertically, not anywhere on screen, but vertically, right? So by default, it's about 75% of the way up the screen. I guess if you wanted to appear directly in the middle, you can do that, right? So now there it is again. I got stuff going on there. So this is right in the middle. If you prefer that to be right at the top of the screen, you know, you can put it up there as well, right? So that's kind of cool.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:43]:
I would actually leave that in the default, but that's kind of, you know, again, small, small thing, but kind of a nice, kind of a nice little change there. And I've closed all my windows. Let me bring everything back here. Power Display. So this is one of the first— this is one of 2 brand new tools since the last time talk. So if you have multiple monitors, this is something that you're going to want to enable and play with. What you see with this interface is going to vary depending on the capabilities of your monitors, right? And so if I go into the tray here, this is the icon for it, right? You, if you're going to use a lot, you might just drag it out there. But when you click this, what you can see here is you can actually, you can tell that I have 3 monitors, but also that they have different capabilities, right? So this top one is for the laptop, and that's the brightness control.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:33]:
That's the only thing that that screen supports for whatever reason. This is a small, or probably a 15 or 16-inch USB-C display. It supports brightness and contrast. I can't— I mean, I could change it, but you're not going to see that because I'm not— that's this— that's not what this is. This Dell display is the one that you see, and this supports brightness, contrast, and volume. But there are other capabilities, again, depending on the monitor. Import. Input source control is in there, rotation, right, like you might have on a tablet PC or a 360 PC, color temperature, and power state, right? And then there's a couple of additional things here.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:11]:
This is maybe the most useful of the 3, and this lets you link the brightness controls across each of your displays all at one time. So you click this and then you get one brightness control and it will apply to every display. So in my case, 3 displays. I don't have Light Switch on right now. Light Switch is that utility that lets you go between light and dark mode automatically. But if I did, this integrates with that. And so you get, you know, that it will look correct and all that kind of stuff depending on whatever that pro— that is. And then there's a whole profile thing you can do in here, which I have not set up at all.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:47]:
I've only kind of played with this a little bit. But you can also, you can create profiles so that you have whatever combination of settings On whatever monitors you have, and then you can choose that and it will automatically change all the configurations, right? All at one time is kind of useful. So, um, really kind of a neat thing if you have multiple displays, right? Um, Advanced Paste is a tool that I actually don't use that often, but they just updated this to support local AI models. So one of the things you can do is enable this option, Paste with AI. If you do that, you can choose a model. So most of them are these online models, right? So Google Gemini is in there, OpenAI ChatGPT. But then you can also choose these local models. Now, if you have a Copilot Plus PC, which this is, PhiSilica, which is a Microsoft model, is already installed.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:40]:
So I've just configured to say yes, I chose it earlier. So this is here. If I had multiple models, I could choose which one was the default. Uh, I only have one, so it's, it is the default. And the way that, um, this works is, and I'm going to, this is, this will be a bad demo in many ways, but if I just, um, you know, the, uh, I don't know why I'm trying to type. I can't type, but, uh, it does something, something. Um, so, you know, that you can copy that to clipboard, Ctrl+C, you can cut it, also copy to the clipboard. You probably know you could do Windows key plus V to turn on the clipboard history so you can have multiple items.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:19]:
That's not enabled on this particular computer. But when you use Advanced Paste, you get— you can use Windows key plus Shift plus V right now. I'm pasting it into the same app, which is not a great demo like I said, but you get this unique dialog where you have different choices based on what the content is you're pasting. Now, in this case, it's just plain text. So you don't really see much here, but you can paste this as plain text, as Markdown, or as JSON, which is a kind of a, it's not really XML, but it's like an XML-based configuration type file, but a developer might use. But this is, this will, like I said, will vary by content. It will vary based on where you're going with it, et cetera, et cetera. And it's using Local AI to do this conversion on the fly, which in this case, there's no conversion.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:12]:
It's just plain text, but it could be doing that conversion. And what that means is you don't have to be connected to the internet, right? It will work locally on the model that's on your computer. So you could be on a plane, you could just be offline, whatever it is. So it's kind of a neat little feature. And we're starting to see more and more of those Local AI stuff, right? ZoomIt, we've talked about, and this is really hard to demo because I already have screen recording software occurring here. You know, ZoomIt is, um, is basically a live screen sharing application. So it was written by Mark Russinovich, a genius who's the, uh, CTO of Azure now at Microsoft. Microsoft bought his company, um, and they got all of these utilities, of which this is one, um, that were part of System Internals, right? Um, Sysinternals.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:58]:
So ZoomIt now is part of, uh, PowerToys because of its kind of universal, um, applicability, like a lot of people might want to use this. Um, it, it really is, um, optimal for people who are presenters, right? And you're presenting where you're showing something on screen. So again, I can't really fully do this because it does screen recording, screen snipping. There's a, um, you can do different things on and on, but the, the biggest thing, and let me just bring up like, uh, let's see, I'll just bring up an image or something. So just, you kind of get the effects. This is like an Amiga. You know, demo from a million years ago. Um, if you hit Ctrl+1, it will zoom into wherever the mouse cursor is, zoom out, right? And so it's kind of a neat way you're showing something on screen, you want to kind of go in and get out.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:43]:
Um, you can do Ctrl+2 to draw on the screen, right? Um, Ctrl and then just get rid of it. It's not really, I'm not impacting the thing that's under it. And then there's a bunch of other things, right? Um, the thing that has been added recently to this app, and this is incredible because this thing has got to be 20 years old or more. Um, is that you can now do, um, uh, what is essentially like presenter mode in PowerPoint. If you've ever done that, we have 2 screens. One of them is the screen that you're looking at as the presenter. One of them is the screen that the audience is looking at, right? And if, and when you think about, uh, like what I'm doing here, which is I'm showing you a screen and I'm trying to show you something, um, you can, uh, You can show the entire screen of a second screen. You can show a window, or you can show just a region of the screen, right? So I'll just do the screen.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:36]:
It's just to make it simple. But, you know, Ctrl+9 is how you enter this mode. Now, in this case, what it's doing is putting it on— it's putting this display that you see onto a secondary display. That's not particularly useful. Let me Ctrl+9 to get out of that. If you go over to If I go over to, rather, to one of the other screens and Ctrl+9, which is the screen share, right? Um, actually you don't see that either because it's, it's, I have 3 screens. So I'm sorry, you can't really see it. But the point of this is it puts it out on the display.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:08]:
So if I had 2 displays here, you were looking at this display, it would be a way for me to show you that screen, uh, from the other, uh, screen, if that makes sense. It's kind of a tough demo because of, you know, what we're doing here, but. Okay. All right. So now, um, we talked about multitasking fairly recently. If you've been using Windows for any amount of time, you know about Alt+Tab, right? So Alt+Tab, Alt, let's hold it. And now you can see whatever is on this thing. Um, you know, I'm using OBS for the screen recording.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:34]:
I've got the PowerToys settings up, et cetera, et cetera. So I've got different things here. Um, and you, you let go and it goes away, right? Um, we also have Task View, which is, uh, Windows key plus Tab. And when you hit that, It's a similar interface except that it's persistent and it only shows you in this case in a multi-screen setup like I have, uh, the apps that are running on this screen, right? So they're on my other screens. I can see other apps up in this area, but okay. So that's, that's kind of the primary way. If you have a lot of things or the primary ways that you can switch between open windows and applications, right? But let's say we have a bunch of things going on here. Um, this might not be the best example, but.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:14]:
I will, um, I'll open 3 instances of Notepad and 1 instance of Paint. And I guess I will bring up, I don't know, I can't really do too much here, but, um, Typora. Yeah. See where that goes. Okay. So that's here. Okay. So you've got all this stuff going on.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:32]:
So these are, you know, 4 or 5 windows that you can see. I have other windows and other screens, but you know, when you bring up Alt Tab, it's like, oh, you know, it's a bunch of stuff. Right. So what if you want to switch between The windows of a single application. In other words, what you want is basically Alt Tab, but for one app. And so there's a new utility in PowerToys called Windows Hopper, which does just that. By default, the keyboard shortcut is Alt Tick. Tick might not mean anything to you.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:03]:
Tick is the unshifted tilde key. It's the key on a U.S. keyboard. It's above the Tab key, which is why they chose it. Right? So instead of doing Alt Tab, I can you know. Depending on what app is selected. So now I have Notepad selected. I do have 3 windows.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:19]:
You can see when I do Alt+Tick, it's like Alt+Tab, but it's only for this app. That's pretty cool. Um, if I bring up an app like, um, Paint here where there's only one instance, if I do Alt+Tick, nothing happens because there is no other app, right? Um, if I opened a second instance of Paint, And did this again, now I get that interface, right? So it doesn't do anything if it doesn't need to, or if there's no point in it. But if you do choose an app where you have multiple windows, this is a way just to switch between those. It declutters that view and it's, you know, easy to find stuff. It's not a great example. These are just empty, you know, Notepad windows, but, um, this is very useful. And I actually, you know, this is something I think this is going to make its way into my rotation.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:08]:
I think this is an app I'm actually going to use. Uh, pretty regularly. Like, I'll just leave this thing enabled. It just kind of sits there and runs in the background. It's nice. So there's actually a lot more, but I, I, you know, I had to limit it to some number. I don't know what those 5 or 7 things, but 2 new utilities. Like I said, Windows Hopper, which is that Alt+Tab for one app.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:26]:
Um, Power Display, if you have multiple displays, awesome. And then just the dozens and dozens of updates. I mean, just in the, you know, months since we did the last episode about this set of utilities has been so much. So this is, like I said, something everyone who uses Windows 11 should have on their computer. You need to spend a little bit of time and look, you know, go through the utilities, figure out which ones you're going to use or not use. Do use that settings interface, right, to turn off the ones you're not going to use and leave the ones you're going to enable on, right? So Keyboard Manager is an example of one that is not enabled by default. I always turn it on. Um, I, like I told you before, I have that, um, one shortcut.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:09]:
So, uh, this equates to the Copilot key. It's kind of a weird set of keys there, but, um, I have that one set up to left arrow, but there's all kinds of stuff you could do with that. But, um, it's worth, you know, you might spend 20 or 30 minutes really the first time you ever run it, but there's so much here. And I think, um, and I know, I, I'm positive everyone who uses Windows will find something in here. That's super valuable. You'll use all the time. Don't understand why it's not just part of Windows, but at least it's available. It's free, right? You can get it from the store, you can get it from the web, and it gets better all the time.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:43]:
So hopefully you found this useful. We will have a new episode of Hands-On Windows every Thursday. You can find out more about this podcast at twit.tv/how. Thank you again for watching. Thank you especially to our club members.